All right. Welcome everyone. I'm Florian. I'm based in Switzerland at the Bernie University
of Applied Sciences, and today I'm going to present to you a project that we've been working
on for, yeah, a bit like a year in the core phase, let's say, and let's call it openparlated.ch.
So basically, if you ask yourself what has happened in Switzerland, in the education policy,
for example, in the last, let's say, five years, as a few, for example, a researcher,
a journalist, or also civil society organization, advocacy manager, for example, this is really
hard to answer this question. It's going to take you a lot of time or a lot of money like
you need access to, like, an expensive lobbying or monitoring tool to get to kind of
acquire this data. Why is this the case? As a lot of countries in the world, like Switzerland
also federalist country, so the decisions are not just made at the national level, but also
at the subnational level. So that means we have one parliament, we have 26 cantinal
parliament, which is like the subnational, and then we have even 461 municipal parliament,
and that's for a country of 8 million people, so you can imagine. Yes, and if you look
at, like, legislative data in Switzerland, you don't have to be able to read that, but basically
the messages, it's apples and oranges. So there's a couple of parliament that provide data
through APIs, but most of them, they have, like, they rarely have websites, there's a lot
of PDFs going on. Yeah, so it's a really massive situation. So the data is not really accessible,
it's definitely not harmonized. Yeah, and it comes in, like, many forms and shapes. So again,
as I've said, it's quite costly, you need a lot of resources to have access to these APIs.
There's also kind of symmetries, like, given that, because, yeah, if you have, if you have
the financial means, then you're able to access the data if you don't have the financial
means you simply can't. And there's also a lot of inefficiencies, especially in the research,
but also in the journalism sector, it's like, like, political scientists, for example,
they get the data to clean them for their specific project, but they don't share the data
with others. So what we try to do or what we decided to do is we want to collaboratively,
basically, involving all the user groups, build an open standard, but also, obviously, an open
API for harmonized Swiss legislative data. With that, and that's open par data.ch. So we give
everyone at this point access to harmonized the open data from currently 78 national,
Cantonese and municipal parliament. So researchers, journalists, civil society organizations
can, on the one hand, analyze the states, but also monitor it. And with that, we basically
want to foster transparency participation and innovation. So, basically, we have, kind of,
like, a two track approach. On the one hand, we kind of, like, we're currently fighting symptoms
on one hand. So we built this API as an MVP with a kind of short-term solution. So we import
the data, we clean it, we harmonize it, and we publish it openly. Through our API, that's basically
what we did in 2025, to basically create value ASAP. And also, like, get feedback from the community
from the users. As the next step, and that's what we're currently doing, we want to kind of
build this into a product, kind of in the medium-term. So we're adding, like, a value-based governance,
but also a business model to be able to find it an actually sustained structure.
But then, on the other hand, we're also trying to fight root causes. That's why we're developing
data standards in a kind of, like, a Swiss framework to a organization for public and that sense
legislative data. And in the next step, as soon as you have to stand it, which is going to be the
case, at the end of the year, basically, fingers crossed, to then enable an encourage in that sense,
like, also actively lobby parliament and governments to implement standards and also publish their
data through Open APIs. Yes. And that's, if that all goes right, we will be able to kind of,
like, phase out one crawler after another that we're currently using to get most of the data.
Yes. So maybe just quickly about how do we do that? So, as of set, we scrape the data, we do that with
it's a bit cut off, sorry, from the rendering, but we do that with a patchy hop ETL, put that into
post-gressed field database, and then that gets queried with fast API front-end backend, angular
front-end, and then react admin panel. So you get the JSON output from our API. You can test that,
or you can check it out, it's currently in better, but we're about to switch to release version
in the next weeks, and we always welcome feedback. So, please make an issue if you see something
that doesn't behave as it should. What data do we have? So, yeah, we have data on, like, what do we
name that mean by? Legislative data, sorry. So, we have data on bills, we have data on
political actors, so, like, MPs, how they wrote, which committees that they are part of,
when do they meet agendas in parliament, meeting minutes, we have votes in parliament, we have
different degrees, so laws, we have a lot of documents, also, yeah, we extracted all the information
from those documents as well, so it's all terrible. So, a lot of text and a lot of processes, basically.
Yeah, so, for this is how if you query our API, this is what it could look like,
I'm just one excerpt, for example, for this case, the concose of vote, of the canton of
vote, this would be like an extract from the bills. Then, we also built like a GUI, but for the
sole purpose of kind of like for people, also for non-technical people to be able to preview the data,
it's not really supposed to be used as kind of a monitoring tool itself, but more to,
so people know what's going on. I think quite a cool feature is also if you go through the GUI,
you will all get the API query as the URL and hit HTML and JSON. So, what can you do with our data?
We basically, this like, evaluated or are focusing on two use cases or like two use case
clusters, so to say, one is kind of like one time or your recurring data analysis,
and every focus on researchers and journalists, like data journalists in that sense,
and then there's kind of the use case of like more continuous and real-time tool assisted
political monitoring. By civil society organizations, by intercontinental conferences, that's a
very Swiss thing, you don't have to know what that is, but then also journalists, so that they
for example alerts, if something like something that interests them pops up. But we also want to
kind of enable like exchange of data and information between different parlaments,
between administration and parlaments, etc, etc. Yes, so just in an actual, what can you do?
For example, as a researcher, for example, you can analyze bills, so how do they progress in parlaments,
how do they go through the different stages, what are the success factors, like who submits them,
etc, etc. You can evaluate and analyze topical trends, you can analyze decrease and their
legislative footprint, basically, voting behavior, for example, but also links to other
data sources, like media coverage, companionsion, company registry, etc, etc. And the goal is really
here to kind of also build like an ecosystem or a research ecosystem around the state, as so.
We want to encourage and enable researchers to cooperate, to share data, to share
clean and rich data, so if they process the data, they can share it with others, or they can share
pre-trained ML class, like machine learning classifiers, topic modeling, stuff, but also data processing
pipelines. Yes, and just like how, how does this kind of like look like, but it's, yeah, it's not
super important, but basically, again, we get the data from from the parlaments, but also from
third parties, via some APIs, mostly, by web crawling, and then we can offer it to different
researchers, they can cooperate, among each other, but also kind of going through our platform at some point.
Yes, and like we just like finish that work, basically, and it is already like the first article
published a couple of weeks ago, which looks at, for example, both in behavior, in this case,
in Geneva, so basically on a left-right axis kind of compare how the different parties vote.
There's also like another funny prototype happening, so there's a module here, kind of undell
analyzed how animals are discussed in the Swiss parliament. So for example, here you see
bunnies, like this is how much, like, like, rabbits were since the 1990s, like, 13 times mentioned
in Swiss parliament, for example. Yeah, so what we are, what I do is, so basically we have this
prototype or the special version now, but the question is really, okay, how can we keep the
state accessible and how can we like operate this like open data infrastructure sustainably
and in the public interest? So the questions are kind of okay, how do we govern it,
democratically, how can we like operate it, efficiently and financially sustainably,
and how can others contribute high quality and drop purple data? And then last but not least,
what can we learn from this? Yeah, so basically, yeah, we're in the process of doing that.
I got like a grant from the Swiss government to kind of focus on these two aspects.
So we are currently evaluating and develop in principles.
Yeah, so yeah, that's quite a quite self explanatory. I'm also objecting for the whole data in
infrastructure and what we're also doing is kind of focusing on the business model currently.
So we're based on OSS, but also open data or data and digital comments, project business models,
we kind of prioritize, prioritize a couple of revenue streams that we have a look at that
really evaluate more thoroughly. For example, usage, fees, membership fees, kind of like in the
comments, comments area, dualizing, but also grants and donations, grants is how this project
has been funded so far, but also kind of selling support, services and consultancy.
And the next steps are really of this project is kind of developing, implementing and evaluating
again, the business model governance and organizational structure contributes and then, but we also
want to implement contribution and data quality mechanisms and then last but not least check out
if there are kind of synergies between what we are doing and like a potential legislative database.
And if that all works out, like we want to scale this kind of maybe as so to some extent to
nationally, but maybe also to other kind of like data spaces in Switzerland.
Yeah, and just very quickly what have you learned so far, super important to continuously
involve the stakeholders and the users from the very, very start. That's what we did.
Coalition of the willing, so we offer a hand to everybody and say do you want to join us?
But if they say no, we don't get blocked by these kind of people.
Yes, and then super important transparency for us, so we want to really lift this well,
so everything is in the open, working in the open, there's no closed meeting notes, everything is on
GitLab and focus. And so there's like various amounts of creeps, feature creep,
blah blah blah, data creep or whatever, try to fight those. Yes, I think that's it from my side,
and I would love to hear your feedback. And if you have any ideas or people, you think I should talk to you.
Thank you so much.
Couple of minutes for questions, it's great.
Yeah, so I had to run through this. Yeah.
We should also see that some point to access on that. Does it mean that there are some
elements that send this for people to rest of that? No.
Yeah, so the question was that you mentioned, and you asked the weather, whether there's
economists that offer data through financial compensation? No, that was a misunderstanding. No,
it's just you pay for for a monitoring tool for somebody to give you access to the data,
but like data is all public, so we only currently supply public data, but it's not really accessible.
So as if you want to scale, if you don't want to just have a look at like one specific
parliament at one point in time, then it's just, yeah, it's a lot of effort, basically.
Yeah, and the second was about the switch to creating to APIs. Yes, you were
on an in-game experience, when the parliament is doubting what was in API.
So that doesn't look like it was less switched than what we could scrape.
And so in the end, we remained on scraping, although we have to switch for some parts,
because of the APIs of what's working. Yeah, that's a very good question.
So the question was whether, so from the experience in France, if I got this correctly,
like the data through that was provided through APIs, it was less than what was
available through the website, so to stay with the website.
Yeah, so during the time that we did the project, there was no switch so far,
but the thing is that basically, so we try to kind of counteract this through the standard
basically. So within the standard, there's defined, okay, this has to be published,
kind of in this in that way, so they can't do that. But yeah,
now, but I think it's definitely a very good point, and I think it's also,
I mean, this is a data project, but it's as well, it's also a kind of lobbying project to that extent.
Yes, thank you.
And very good point, I just seen other initiatives, similar, I just know from Brazil,
I think here is a border, it's Black's ML. Yeah, with openly the open standard. Yeah,
have to take a look. Yeah, yeah, Black's ML, so for the decrease, kind of for the text,
we will include LexML and a comment also, which is connected to LexML. Yeah, that's a little, that's, yeah.
Yeah, and if you have other questions, I'm going to be outside for the next five minutes or whatever,
or just until there's no more questions. Thank you.